From the misconduct of officers and soldiers, he passes to that of the coureurs de bois and licensed traders; and here he is equally severe. He dilates on the evils which result from permitting the colonists to go to the Indians instead of requiring the Indians to come to the settlements. “It serves only to rob the country of all its young men, weaken families, deprive wives of their husbands, sisters of their brothers, and parents of their children; expose the voyagers to a hundred dangers of body and soul; involve them in a multitude of expenses, some necessary, some useless, and some criminal; accustom them to do no work, and at last disgust them with it for ever; make them live in constant idleness, unlit them completely for any trade, and render them useless to themselves, their families, and the public. But it is less as regards the body than as regards the soul, that this traffic of the French among the savages is infinitely hurtful. It carries them far away from churches, separates them from priests and nuns, and severs them from all instruction, all exercise of religion, and all spiritual aid. It sends them into places wild and almost inaccessible, through a thousand perils by land and water, to carry on by base, abject, and shameful means a trade which would much better be carried on at Montreal.”
But in the complete transfer of the trade to Montreal, he sees insuperable difficulties, and he proceeds to suggest, as the last and best resort, that garrisons and officers should be withdrawn, and licenses abolished; that discreet and virtuous persons should be chosen to take charge of all the trade of the upper country; that these persons should be in perfect sympathy and correspondence with the Jesuits; and that the trade should be carried on at the missions of the Jesuits and in their presence. *
This letter brings us again face to face with the brandy question, of which we have seen something already in the quarrel between Avaugour and the bishop. In the summer of 1648, there was held at the mission of Sillery a temperance meeting; the first in all probability on this continent. The drum beat after mass, and the Indians gathered at the summons. Then an Algonquin chief, a zealous convert of the Jesuits, proclaimed to the crowd a late edict of the governor imposing penalties for drunkenness, and, in his own name and that of the other chiefs, exhorted them to abstinence, declaring that all drunkards should be handed over to the French for punishment. Father Jerome Lalemant looked on delighted. “It was,” he says, “the finest public act of jurisdiction exercised among the Indians since I have been in this country. From the beginning of the world they have all thought themselves as great lords, the one as the other, and never before submitted to their chiefs any further than they chose to do so.” *
There was great need of reform; for a demon of drunkenness seemed to possess these unhappy tribes. Nevertheless, with all their rage for brandy, they sometimes showed in regard to it a self-control quite admirable in its way. When at a fair, a council, or a friendly visit, their entertainers regaled them with rations of the coveted liquor, so prudently measured out that they could not be the worse for it, they would unite their several portions in a common stock, which they would then divide among a few of their number, thus enabling them to attain that complete intoxication which, in their view, was the true end of all drinking. The objects of this singular benevolence were expected to requite it in kind on some future occasion.
A drunken Indian with weapons within reach, was very dangerous, and all prudent persons kept out of his way. This greatly pleased him; for, seeing everybody run before him, he fancied himself a great chief, and howled and swung his tomahawk with redoubled fury. If, as often happened, he maimed or murdered some wretch not nimble enough to escape, his countrymen absolved him from all guilt, and blamed only the brandy. Hence, if an Indian wished to take a safe revenge on some personal enemy, he would pretend to be drunk; and, not only murders but other crimes were often committed by false claimants to the bacchanalian privilege.
In the eyes of the missionaries, brandy was a fiend with all crimes and miseries in his train; and, in fact, nothing earthly could better deserve the epithet infernal than an Indian town in the height of a drunken debauch. The orgies never ceased till the bottom of the barrel was reached. Then came repentance, despair, wailing, and bitter invective against the white men, the cause of all the woe. In the name of the public good, of humanity, and above all of religion, the bishop and the Jesuits denounced the fatal traffic.
Their case was a strong one; but so was the case of their opponents. There was real and imminent danger that the thirsty savages, if refused brandy by the French, would seek it from the Dutch and English of New York. It was the most potent lure and the most killing bait. Wherever it was found, thither the Indians and their beaver-skins were sure to go, and the interests of the fur trade, vital to the colony, were bound up with it. Nor was this all, for the merchants and the civil powers insisted that religion and the saving of souls were bound up with it no less; since, to repel the Indians from the Catholic French, and attract them to the heretic English, was to turn them from ways of grace to ways of perdition. * The argument, no doubt, was dashed largely with hypocrisy in those who used it; but it was one which the priests were greatly perplexed to answer.
In former days, when Canada was not yet transformed from a mission to a colony, the Jesuits entered with a high hand on the work of reform.
It fared hard with the culprit caught in the act of selling brandy to Indians. They led him, after the sermon, to the door of the church; where, kneeling on the pavement, partially stript and bearing in his hand the penitential torch, he underwent a vigorous flagellation, laid on by Father Le Mercier himself, after the fashion formerly practised in the case of refractory school-boys. * Bishop Laval not only discharged against the offenders volleys of wholesale excommunication, but he made of the offence a “reserved case;” that is, a case in which the power of granting absolution was reserved to himself alone. This produced great commotion, and a violent conflict between religious scruples and a passion for gain. The bishop and the Jesuits stood inflexible; while their opponents added bitterness to the quarrel by charging them with permitting certain favored persons to sell brandy, unpunished, and even covertly selling it themselves. **
Appeal was made to the king, who, with his Jesuit confessor, guardian of his conscience on one side, and Colbert, guardian of his worldly interests on the other, stood in some perplexity. The case was referred to the fathers of the Sorbonne, and they, after solemn discussion, pronounced the selling of brandy to Indians a mortal sin. * It was next referred to an assembly of the chief merchants and inhabitants of Canada, held under the eye of the governor, intendant, and council, in the Chateau St. Louis. Each was directed to state his views in writing. The great majority were for unrestricted trade in brandy; a few were for a limited and guarded trade; and two or three declared for prohibition. ** Decrees of prohibition were passed from time to time, but they were unavailing. They were revoked, renewed, and revoked again. They were, in fact, worse than useless; for their chief effect was to turn traders and coureurs de bois into troops of audacious contrabandists. Attempts were made to limit the brandy trade to the settlements, and exclude it from the forest country, where its regulation was impossible; but these attempts, like the others, were of little avail. It is worthy of notice that, when brandy was forbidden everywhere else, it was permitted in the trade of Tadoussac, carried on for the profit of government. ***
In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of Père La Chaise, and of the Archbishop of Paris, whom he also consulted, the king was never at heart a prohibitionist. * His Canadian revenue was drawn from the fur trade; and the singular argument of the partisans of brandy, that its attractions were needed to keep the Indians from contact with heresy, served admirably to salve his conscience. Bigot as he was, he distrusted the Bishop of Quebec, the great champion of the anti-liquor movement. His own letters, as well as those of his minister, prove that he saw or thought that he saw motives for the crusade very different from those inscribed on its banners. He wrote to Saint-Vallier, Laval’s successor in the bishopric, that the brandy trade was very useful to the kingdom of France; that it should be regulated, but not prevented; that the consciences of his subjects must not be disturbed by denunciations of it as a sin; and that “it is well that you (the bishop) should take care that the zeal of the ecclesiastics is not excited by personal interests and passions.” ** Perhaps he alludes to the spirit of encroachment and domination which he and his minister in secret instructions to their officers often impute to the bishop and the clergy, or perhaps he may have in mind other accusations which had reached him
from time to time during many years, and of which the following from the pen of the most noted of Canadian governors will serve as an example. Count Frontenac declares that the Jesuits greatly exaggerate the disorders caused by brandy, and that they easily convince persons “who do not know the interested motives which have led them to harp continually on this string for more than forty years.... They have long wished to have the fur trade entirely to themselves, and to keep out of sight the trade which they have always carried on in the woods, and which they are carrying on there now.” *
Trade of the Jesuits.—As I have observed in a former volume, the charge against the Jesuits of trading in beaver-skins dates from the beginning of the colony. In the private journal of Father Jerome Lalemant, their superior, occurs the following curious passage, under date of November, 1645: “Pour la traite des castors. Le 15 de Nov. le bruit estant qu’on s’en alloit icy publier la defense qui auoit esté publiée aux Trois Riuieres que pas vu n’eut à traiter avec les sauvages, le P. Vimont demanda à Mons. des Chastelets commis general si nous serions de pire condition soubs eux que soubs Messieurs de la Compagnie. La conclusion fut que non et que cela iroit pour nous à U ordinaire, mais que nous le fissions doucement.” Journal des Jésuites. Two years after, on the request of Lalemant, the governor Montmagny, and his destined successor Aillebout, gave the Jesuits a certificate to the effect that “les pères de la compagnie de Jésus sont innocents de la calomnie qui leur a été imputée, et ce qu’ils en ont fiait a été pour le bien de la communauté et pour un bon sujet.” This leaves it to be inferred that they actually traded, though with good intentions. In 1664, in reply to similar “calumnies,” the Jesuits made by proxy a declaration before the council, stating, “que les dits Révérends Pères Jésuites n’ont fait jamais aucune profession de vendre et n’ont jamais rien vendu, mais seulement que les marchandises qu’ils donnent aux particuliers ne sont que pour avoir leurs
nécessités.” This is an admission in a thin disguise. The word nécessités is of very elastic interpretation. In a memoir of Talon, 1667, he mentions, “la traite de pelleteries qu’on assure qu’ils (les Jésuites) font aux Outaouacks et au Cap de la Madeleine; ce que je ne sais pas de science certaine.”
That which Talon did not know with certainty is made reasonably clear for us by a line in the private journal of Father Le Mercier, who writes under date of 17 August, 1665, “Le Père Frémin remonte supérieur au Cap de la Magdeleine, ou le temporel est en bon estât. Comme il est delivre de tout soin d'aucune traite, il doit s’appliquer à l’instruction tant des Montagnets que des Algonquins.” Father Charles Albanel was charged, under Frémin, with the affairs of the mission, including doubtless the temporal interests, to the prosperity of which Father Le Merciei alludes, and the cares of trade from which Father Frémin was delivered. Cavelier de la Salle declared in 1678, “Le père Arbanelle (Albanel) jésuite a traité au Cap (de la Madeleine) pour 700 pistoles de peaux d’orignaux et de castors; luy mesme me l’a dit en 1667. Il vend le pain, le vin, le bled, le lard, et il tient magazin au Cap aussi bien que le frère Joseph à Québec. Ce frère gagne 500 pour 100 sur tous les peuples. Ils (les Jésuites) ont bâti leur collège en partie de leur traite et en partie de l’emprunt.” La Salle further says that Frémin, being reported to have made enormous profits, “ce père répondit au gouverneur (qui lui en avait fait des plaintes) par un billet que luy a conservé, que c’estoit une calomnie que ce grand gain prétendu; puisque tout ce qui se passoit par ses mains ne pouvoit produire par an que quatre mille de revenant bon, tous frais faits, sans comprendre les gages des domestiques.” La Salle gives also many other particulars, especially relating to Michillimackinac, where, as he says, the Jesuits had a large stock of beaver-skins. According to Peronne Dumesnil, Mémoire de 1671, the Jesuits had at that time more than 20,000 francs a year, partly from trade and partly from charitable contributions of their friends in France.
The king repeatedly forbade the Jesuits and other ecclesiastics in Canada to carry on trade. On one occasion he threatened strong measures should they continue to disobey him. Le Roi à Frontenac, 28 Avril, 1677. In the same year the minister wrote to the intendant Duchesneau: “Vous ne sauriez apporter trop de precautions pour abolir entièrement la coustume que les Ecclesiastiques séculiers et réguliers avaient pris de traitter ou de faire traitter leurs valets,” 18 Avril, 1677.
The Jesuits entered also into other branches of trade and industry with a vigor and address which the inhabitants of Canada might have emulated with advantage. They were successful fishers of eels. In 1646, their eel-pots at Sillery are said to have yielded no less than forty thousand eels, some of which they sold at the modest price of thirty sous a hundred. Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 82. The members of the order were exempted from payment of duties, and in 1674 they were specially empowered to construct mills, including sugar-mills, and beep slaves, apprentices, and hired servants. Droit Canadien, 180.
Church and State.—The Bishop and the King.—The King and the Cures.—The New Bishop.—The Canadian Cure.—Ecclesiastical Rule.—Saint-Vallier and Denonville.—Clerical Rigor.—Jesuit and Sulpitian.—Courcelle and Châtelain.—The Recollets.—Heresy and Witchcraft.—Canadian Nuns.—Jeanne Le Ber.—Education.—The Seminary.—Saint Joachim.—Miracles op Saint Anne.—Canadian Schools.
When Laval and the Jesuits procured the recall of Mézy, they achieved a seeming triumph; yet it was but a defeat in disguise. While ordering home the obnoxious governor, the king and Colbert made a practical assertion of their power too strong to be resisted. A vice-regal officer, a governor, an intendant, and a regiment of soldiers, were silent but convincing proofs that the mission days of Canada were over, and the dream of a theocracy dispelled for ever. The ecclesiastics read the signs of the times, and for a while seemed to accept the situation.
The king on his part, in vindicating the civil power, had shown a studious regard to the sensibilities of the bishop and his allies. The lieutenant-general Tracy, a zealous devotee, and the intendant Talon, who at least professed to be one, were not men to offend the clerical party needlessly. In the choice of Courcelle, the governor, a little less caution had been shown. His chief business was to fight the Iroquois, for which he was well fitted, but he presently showed signs of a willingness to fight the Jesuits also. The colonists liked him for his lively and impulsive speech; but the priests were of a different mind, and so, too, was his colleague Talon, a prudent person who studied the amenities of life and knew how to pursue his ends with temper and moderation. On the subject of the clergy he and the governor substantially agreed, but the ebullitions of the one and the smooth discretion of the other were mutually repugnant to both. Talon complained of his colleague’s impetuosity; and Colbert directed him to use his best efforts to keep Courcelle within bounds and prevent him from publicly finding fault with the bishop and the Jesuits.* Next we find the minister writing to Courcelle himself to soothe his ruffled temper, and enjoining him to act discreetly, “because,” said Colbert, “as the colony grows the king’s authority will grow with it, and the authority of the priests will be brought back in time within lawful bounds.” **
Meanwhile, Talon had been ordered to observe carefully the conduct of the bishop and the Jesuits, “who,” says the minister, “have hitherto nominated governors for the king, and used every
means to procure the recall of those chosen without their participation; * filled offices with their adherents, and tolerated no secular priests except those of one mind with them.” ** Talon, therefore, under the veil of a reverent courtesy, sharply watched them. They paid courtesy with courtesy, and the intendant wrote home to his master that he saw nothing amiss in them. He quickly changed his mind. “I should have had less trouble and more praise,” he writes in the next year, “if I had been willing to leave the power of the church ¦where I found it.” *** “It is easy,” he says again,
“to incur the ill-will of the Jesuits if one does not accept all their opinions and abandon one’s self to their direction even in temporal matters; for their encroachments extend to affairs of police, which concern only the civil magistrate;” and he recommends that one or two of them be sent home as disturbers of the peace. **** They, on their part, changed attitude towards both him and the governor. One of them, Father Bardy, less discreet than the rest, is said to have preached a sermon against them at Quebec, in which he likened them to a pair of toadstools springing up in a night, adding that a good remedy would soon be found, and that Courcelle would have to run home like other governors before him. (v)
Tracy escaped clerical attacks. He was
extremely careful not to provoke them; and one of his first acts was to restore to the council the bishop’s adherents, whom Mézy had expelled. * And if, on the one hand, he was too pious to quarrel with the bishop, so, on the other, the bishop was too prudent to invite collision with a man of his rank and influence.
After all, the dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical powers was not fundamental. Each had need of the other. Both rested on authority, and they differed only as to the boundary lines of their respective shares in it. Yet the dispute of boundaries was a serious one, and it remained a source of bitterness for many years. The king, though rigidly Catholic, was not yet sunk in the slough of bigotry into which Maintenon and the Jesuits succeeded at last in plunging him. He had conceived a distrust of Laval, and his jealousy of his royal authority disposed him to listen to the anti-clerical counsels of his minister. How needful they both thought it to prune the exuberant growth of clerical power, and how cautiously they set themselves to do so, their letters attest again and again. “The bishop,” writes Colbert, “assumes a domination far beyond that of other bishops throughout the Christian world, and particularly in the kingdom of France.” ** “It is the will of his Majesty that you confine him and the Jesuits within just bounds, and let none of them
overstep these bounds in any manner whatsoever. Consider this as a matter of the greatest importance, and one to which you cannot give too much attention.” * “But,” the prudent minister elsewhere writes, “it is of the greatest consequence that the bishop and the Jesuits do not perceive that the intendant blames their conduct.” **
It was to the same intendant that Colbert wrote, “it is necessary to diminish as much as possible the excessive number of priests, monks, and nuns, in Canada.” Yet in the very next year, and on the advice of Talon, he himself sent four more to the colony. His motive was plain. He meant that they should serve as a counterpoise to the Jesuits. *** They were mendicant friars, belonging to the branch of the Franciscans known as the Recollets; and they were supposed to be free from the ambition for the aggrandizement of their order which was imputed, and with reason, to the Jesuits. Whether the Recollets were free from it or not, no danger was to be feared from them; for Laval and the Jesuits were sure to oppose them, and they would need the support of the government too much to set themselves in opposition to it. “The more Recollets we have,” says Talon, “the better will the too firmly rooted authority of the others be balanced.” ****
While Louis XIV. tried to confine the priests to
their ecclesiastical functions, he was at the same time, whether from religion, policy, or both combined, very liberal to the Canadian church, of which, indeed, he was the main-stay. In the yearly estimate of “ordinary charges” of the colony, the church holds the most prominent place; and the appropriations for religious purposes often exceed all the rest together. Thus, in 1667, out of a total of 36,360 francs, 28,000 are assigned to church uses. * The amount fluctuated, but was always relatively large. The Canadian curés were paid in great part by the king, who for many years gave eight thousand francs annually towards their support. Such was the poverty of the country that, though in 1685 there were only twenty-five curés, ** each costing about five hundred francs a year, the tithes utterly failed to meet the expense. As late as 1700, the intendant declared that Canada without the king’s help could not maintain more than eight or nine curés. Louis XIV. winced under these steady demands, and reminded the bishop that more than four thousand curés in France lived on less than two hundred francs a year. *** “You say,” he wrote to the intendant, “that it is impossible for a Canadian curé to live on five hundred francs. Then you
must do the impossible to accomplish my intentions, which are always that the curés should live on the tithes alone.” * Yet the head of the church still begged for money, and the king still paid it. “We are in the midst of a costly war,” wrote the minister to the bishop, “yet in consequence of your urgency the gifts to ecclesiastics will be continued as before.” ** And they did continue. More than half a century later, the king was still making them, and during the last years of the colony he gave twenty thousand francs annually to support Canadian curés. ***
The maintenance of curés was but a part of his bounty. He endowed the bishopric with the revenues of two French abbeys, to which he afterwards added a third. The vast tracts of land which Laval had acquired were freed from feudal burdens, and emigrants were sent to them by the government in such numbers that, in 1667, the bishop’s seigniory of Beaupré and Orleans contained more than a fourth of the entire population of Canada. **** He had emerged from his condition of apostolic poverty to find himself the richest land-owner in the colony.
If by favors like these the king expected to lead the ecclesiastics into compliance with his
wishes, he was doomed to disappointment. The system of movable curés, by which the bishop like a military chief could compel each member of his clerical army to come and go at his bidding, was from the first repugnant to Louis XIV. On the other hand, the bishop clung to it with his usual tenacity. Colbert denounced it as contrary to the laws of the kingdom. * “His Majesty has reason to believe,” he writes, “that the chief source of the difficulty which the bishop makes on this point is his wish to preserve a greater authority over the curés.” ** The inflexible prelate, whose heart was bound up in the system he had established, opposed evasion and delay to each expression of the royal will; and even a royal edict failed to produce the desired effect. In the height of the dispute, Laval went to court, and, on the ground of failing health, asked for a successor in the bishopric. The king readily granted his prayer. The successor was appointed; but when Laval prepared to embark again for Canada, he was given to understand that he was to remain in France. In vain he promised to make no trouble; *** and it was not till after an absence of four years that he was permitted to return, no longer as its chief, to his beloved Canadian church. ****
Meanwhile Saint-Vallier, the new bishop, had raised a new tempest. He attacked that organization of the seminary of Quebec by which Laval had endeavored to unite the secular priests of Canada into an attached and obedient family, with the bishop as its head and the seminary as its home, a plan of which the system of movable curés was an essential part. The Canadian priests, devoted to Laval, met the innovations of Saint-Vallier with an opposition which seemed only to confirm his purpose. Laval, old and worn with toil and asceticism, was driven almost to despair. The seminary of Quebec was the cherished work of his life, and, to his thinking, the citadel of the Canadian church; and now he beheld it battered and breached before his eyes. His successor, in fact, was trying to place the church of Canada on the footing of the church of France. The conflict lasted for years, with the rancor that marks the quarrels of non-combatants of both sexes. “He” (Saint-Vallier), says one of his opponents, “has made himself contemptible to almost everybody, and particularly odious to the priests born in Canada; for there is between them and him a mutual antipathy difficult to overcome.” * He is described by the same writer as a person “without reflection and judgment, extreme in all things, secret and artful, passionate when opposed, and a flatterer when he wishes to gain his point.” This amiable critic adds that Saint-Vallier believes a
bishop to be inspired, in virtue of his office, with a wisdom that needs no human aid, and that whatever thought comes to him in prayer is a divine inspiration to be carried into effect at all costs and in spite of all opposition.
The new bishop, notwithstanding the tempest he had raised, did not fully accomplish that establishment of the curés in their respective parishes which the king and the minister so much desired. The Canadian curé was more a missionary than a parish priest; and nature as well as Bishop Laval threw difficulties in the way of settling him quietly over his charge.
On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the king’s orders from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled world before. On the far verge of the ocean-like river, clouds and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff and stunted fir-trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the sea-weed. You are not so solitary as you think. A small birch canoe rounds the point of rocks, and it bears two men; one in an old black cassock, and the other in a buckskin coat; both working hard at the paddle to keep their slender craft off the shingle and the breakers. The man in the cassock is Father Morel, aged forty-eight, the oldest country curé in Canada, most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth as they had need to be. His parochial charge embraces. a string of incipient parishes extending along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Rivière du Sud, a distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls. He has administered spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and now he is on his way to the seigniory of St. Denis with its two houses and eleven souls. *
The father lands where a shattered eel-pot high and dry on the pebbles betrays the neighborhood of man. His servant shoulders his portable chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs, and the taller woods beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them. Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless, barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth of forest ruins, through which the priest and his
follower wind their way, the cat-bird mewing, and the blue-jay screaming as they pass. Now the golden-rod and the aster, harbingers of autumn, fringe with purple and yellow the edge of the older clearing, where wheat and maize, the settler’s meagre harvest, are growing among the stumps.
Wild-looking women, with sunburnt faces and neglected hair, run from their work to meet the curé; a man or two follow with soberer steps and less exuberant zeal; while half-savage children, the coureurs de bois of the future, bareheaded, barefooted, and half-clad, come to wonder and stare. To set up his altar in a room of the rugged log cabin, say mass, hear confessions, impose penance, grant absolution, repeat the office of the dead over a grave made weeks before, baptize, perhaps, the last infant; marry, possibly, some pair who may or may not have waited for his coming; catechize as well as time and circumstance would allow the shy but turbulent brood of some former wedlock: such was the work of the parish priest in the remoter districts. It was seldom that his charge was quite so scattered, and so far extended as that of Father Morel; but there were fifteen or twenty others whose labors were like in kind, and in some cases no less arduous. All summer they paddled their canoes from settlement to settlement; and in winter they toiled on snow-shoes over the drifts; while the servant carried the portable chapel on his back, or dragged it on a sledge. Once, at least, in the year, the curé paid his visit to Quebec, where, under the maternal roof of the seminary he made his retreat of meditation and prayer, and then returned to his work. He rarely had a house of his own, but boarded in that of the seignior or one of the habitants. Many parishes or aggregations of parishes had no other church than a room fitted up for the purpose in the house of some pious settler. In the larger settlements, there were churches and chapels of wood, thatched with straw, often ruinous, poor to the last degree, without ornaments, and sometimes without the sacred vessels necessary for the service. * In 1683, there were but seven stone churches in all the colony. The population was so thin and scattered that many of the settlers heard mass only three or four times a year, and some of them not so often. The sick frequently died without absolution, and infants without baptism.
The splendid self-devotion of the early Jesuit missions has its record; so, too, have the unseemly bickerings of bishops and governors: but the patient toils of the missionary curé rest in the obscurity where the best of human virtues are buried from age to age. What we find set down concerning him is, that Louis XIV. was unable to see why he should not live on two hundred francs a year as well as a village curé by the banks of the Garonne. The king did not know that his cassock and all his clothing cost him twice as much and lasted half as long; that he must have a canoe and a man to paddle it; and that when on his
annual visit the seminary paid him five or six hundred francs, partly in clothes, partly in stores, and partly in money, the end of the year found him as poor as before except only in his conscience.
The Canadian priests held the manners of the colony under a rule as rigid as that of the Puritan churches of New England, but with the difference that in Canada a large part of the population was restive under their control, while some of the civil authorities, often with the governor at their head, supported the opposition. This was due, partly to an excess of clerical severity, and partly to the continued friction between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. It sometimes happened, however, that a new governor arrived, so pious that the clerical party felt that they could rely on him. Of these rare instances the principal is that of Denonville, who, with a wife as pious as himself, and a young daughter, landed at Quebec, in 1685. On this, Bishop Saint-Vallier, anxious to turn his good dispositions to the best account, addressed to him a series of suggestions or rather directions for the guidance of his conduct, with a view to the spiritual profit of those over whom he was appointed to rule. The document was put on file, and the following are some of the points in it. It is divided into five different heads: “Touching feasts,” “touching balls and dances,” “touching comedies and other declamations,” “touching dress,” “touching irreverence in church.” The governor and madame his wife are desired to accept no invitations to suppers, that is to say late dinners, as tending to nocturnal hours and dangerous pastimes; and they are further enjoined to express dissatisfaction, and refuse to come again, should any entertainment offered them be too sumptuous. “Although,” continues the bishop under the second head of his address, “balls and dances are not sinful in their nature, nevertheless they are so dangerous by reason of the circumstances that attend them, and the evil results that almost inevitably follow, that, in the opinion of Saint Francis of Sales, it should be said of them as physicians say of mushrooms, that at best they are good for nothing;” and, after enlarging on their perils, he declares it to be of great importance to the glory of God and the sanctification of the colony, that the governor and his wife neither give such entertainments nor countenance them by their presence. “Nevertheless,” adds the mentor, “since the youth and vivacity of mademoiselle their daughter requires some diversion, it is permitted to relent somewhat, and indulge her in a little moderate and proper dancing, provided that it be solely with persons of her own sex, and in the presence of madame her mother; but by no means in the presence of men or youths, since it is this mingling of sexes which causes the disorders that spring from balls and dances.” Private theatricals in any form are next interdicted to the young lady. The bishop then passes to the subject of her dress, and exposes the abuses against which she is to be guarded. “The luxury of dress,” he says, “appears in the rich and dazzling fabrics wherein the women and girls of Canada attire themselves, and which are far beyond their condition and their means; in the excess of ornaments which they put on; in the extraordinary head-dresses which they affect, their heads being uncovered and full of strange trinkets; and in the immodest curls so expressly forbidden in the epistles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, as well as by all the fathers and doctors of the church, and which God has often severely punished, as may be seen by the example of the unhappy Pretextata, a lady of high quality, who, as we learn from Saint Jerome, who knew her, had her hands withered, and died suddenly five months after, and was precipitated into hell, as God had threatened her by an angel; because, by order of her husband, she had curled the hair of her niece, and attired her after a worldly fashion.” *
Whether the Marquis and Marchioness Denonville profited by so apt and terrible a warning, or whether their patience and good-nature survived the episcopal onslaught, does not appear on record. The subject of feminine apparel received great attention, both from Saint-Vallier and his